[Sca-Cooks] Pasty in Ayto
Johnna Holloway
johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu
Fri Jul 27 17:31:24 PDT 2007
*"pasty* Pasties, particularly those made in Cornwall, have become
objects of some controversy. What sort of meat and other ingredients
should a pasty contain, what shape should its crust be, should its first
syllable rhyme with /hast/ or /past/ (or even /paste/, once a common
pronunciation)? Historically, a /pasty/ is meat baked in a pastry crust
without a dish. The word was borrowed in the thirteenth century from Old
French /pastee/ (ancestor of modern French /pâtée/ and /pâté/), which
came from medieval Latin /pastta/, a derivative of post-classical Latin
/pasta/, ‘paste, dough’. In medieval English, it was generally applied
to a baked case containing only one main ingredient, which was typically
venison (in contrast to the /pie/, which commonly had a miscellaneous
mixture of ingredients). In the seventeenth century, pasties were still
expected to contain venison (although expectations were not always
fulfilled: ‘The venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not
handsome,’ Samuel Pepys, /Diary/, 6 January 1660), but by the late
nineteenth century we even find references to pasties filled with fruit.
And indeed the Cornish pasty itself, the ultimate in easily
transportable lunch, has been known in the past to contain meat and
vegetables at one end and at the other, separated by a pastry partition,
jam or fruit for pudding. Tennyson, in his /Audley Court/ (1842),
described a particularly rococo example of the pasty: ‘A pasty
costly-made, / Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, / Like
fossils of the rock, with golden yolks / Imbedded and injellied.’ The
answer to the above questions, incidentally, is that in their time
Cornish pasties have been filled with mutton, lamb, beef, pork, even
fish, and when money was short, bacon or simply plain vegetables—and in
general, the proportion of potatoes, onions, etc. to meat is according
to what can be afforded; the half-moon shape is essential, but the
pastry can be joined in the middle, in a scalloped crest, or at the
side, with a twisted ropelike effect, according to preference; and the
pronunciation rhyming with /past/ seems to have a longer history than
that rhyming with /hast/."
"pasty" /An A-Z of Food and Drink/. Ed. John Ayto. OUP 2002. /Oxford
Reference Online/.
Johnnae
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